Meaning of "Chango (Guaguanco)"?

Question

Listening to a beautiful song on the Angel Melendez and the 911 Orchestra CD, and there's a song entitled "Chango (Guaguanco)" - can anyone tell me what it means, or refer me to a website to interpret songs in different languages? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I go to http://www.freetranslation.com/ for basic free translations. It's not perfect, but you can get the gist of the song. You'd have to have the Spanish lyrics first though.

Hmm, the lyrics seem to be pretty hard to dig up on the net. I just found a very short sample of the beginning that sounded like "Chango es el rey de los musicos de las artistas y el bailador del tambor tambien del fuego de la rumba y el guaguanco"

That would be:
"Chango is the king of the musicians, of the artists and the dancer. Of the drum, also of the fire, of rumba and the guaguanco" (but I only took a couple of years of high school Spanish so it's not perfect)
Maybe I'll go buy the mp3 :)
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Okay, an update! I got the mp3! There's not really that many lyrics, but I think I saw somewhere that the artist doesn't want them on the internet so it might be illegal for me to try and type up the majority of the song. There's really just one more verse which is basically a list of descriptions of Chango (most likely referring to the god, who is worshipped in a lot of the same areas where guaguanco is popular)

It says stuff like "He's a ladies' man, a smoker, the symbol of the festival and happiness, a good friend and intelligent thinker" and for the rest of the song they sing phrases like "Chango!" and "This is my black Chango!" "The king of guaguanco!" "the king of (los cueros?=leather...not sure if i'm hearing that right), "Perico," probably referring to the Cuban city, but it has a few other meanings.

Answer 2

In case you didn't know, Chango is a god, and guaguanco is an African dance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shango

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaguanco

Answer 3

One is a proper name, the other is the name of a music style/genre, like rumba, bolero, etc. So there is no "translation."